But exhibit manager lacks qualifications
GOVERNMENT | Bruce Rushton
More than a year ago, the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum launched a nationwide search for a director of exhibits.
It was, according to a 2014 report, a critical position for an unaccredited, cash-strapped, short-staffed institution that was caught in a power struggle between the executive director, who had no experience running museums before she was hired in 2010, and the head of the Illinois Historic Preservation Agency, who was the putative boss of the ALPLM director and had no experience with historic preservation before she was tapped in 2012.
“(T)here is a need for an individual with experience planning and executing museum exhibits to coordinate exhibition planning and development,” wrote Karen Witter, a consultant hired to make suggestions on how to improve the museum and gain accreditation, in urging that an exhibits director be hired.
Five years earlier, the American Alliance of Museums pointed out challenges in hiring qualified staff. Union seniority rules made it difficult to ensure that the best applicants would get jobs, AAM experts said in their report that identified a number of weaknesses at ALPLM.
“If a union member meets the qualifications, the job is theirs,” the AAM experts wrote in their 2010 report. “Thus, job descriptions have to be crafted to ensure that the appropriate, specific skills are held by the applicant.”
Last year, the IHPA said it wanted experience in a job description issued for a director of exhibits.
“The ALPLM is seeking a creative, energetic and experienced director of exhibits…to lead the institution’s exhibit programs and initiatives and serve as a key member of the senior management team,” IHPA officials wrote in the description intended to attract the best applicants from across the nation.
Minimum requirements included a bachelor’s degree “in museum administration, museum studies, history, architecture, design or related field.” A post-graduate degree was preferred. Candidates needed a “minimum of four years of progressively responsible administrative experience in a museum, library or university, with extensive experience in exhibition planning and design.”
The position was exempt from the state personnel code, so the best person available could be hired without regard to union seniority rules. Last week, David Bourland, who had been curator at the governor’s mansion, was hired as exhibit manager.
It’s not clear who hired Bourland. ALPLM executive director Eileen Mackevich says that Nadine O’Leary, the institution’s chief of staff, brought Bourland’s name up to her and that she concurred with the choice. O’Leary referred inquiries to the governor’s office. A source says that the museum’s staff was told during a staff meeting last week that Bourland was tapped by the governor’s office. Chris Wills, IHPA spokesman, referred questions to the governor’s office. The governor’s office didn’t respond to inquiries from Illinois Times. Bourland didn’t respond to an email or a telephone message.
But one thing seems clear: Bourland doesn’t have the experience or academic background the IHPA said were minimum requirements when it advertised for an exhibits director last year.
During an interview conducted last year as part of an ALPLM oral history project, Bourland said that he attended Lincoln Land Community College and Sangamon State University, which is now called University of Illinois Springfield. UIS has no record of him obtaining any degrees, either from UIS or Sangamon State.
Asked his major during last year’s interview that lasted more than two hours, Bourland said he did an “individual option program.”
“Basically, it means you can just take whatever classes you want,” Bourland said. “It was outstanding. Art history, accounting, economics classes – just all kinds of things. I quit, or I was done, probably about, maybe, 1981, somewhere around there.”
Bourland once worked at an art framing shop that he bought in 1980 from his mother’s husband. He became a friend of former Gov. Jim Thompson. After Thompson was elected governor in 1976, Bourland said he accepted an invitation to go to work at the mansion, where his pay came from the Illinois Executive Mansion Association, a nonprofit set up to preserve and renovate the mansion. At the time, Bourland said that he had no experience with antiques or furniture, but he was soon going on buying trips to acquire such artifacts as well as art purchased with association money. He said he went to the library to bone up on the finer points of fine furniture.
“It was one of those things where Jim (Thompson) said, ‘I think you need to be the curator,’” Bourland said. “It’s kind of OJT – learn on the job.”
It’s not clear what Bourland will earn now that he’s a state employee. According to the most recent annual forms filed with the Internal Revenue Service by the mansion association, the association in 2012 paid $106,000 for a curator. In his 2014 interview, Bourland said that he helps decide who gets a seat on the association board.
“If I like you, I call Jim Thompson, who’s my chairman, and I say ‘I’ve got a guy who would like to be on the board,’” Bourland said.
According to its most recent IRS filings, the board includes such prominent people as John Nicolay, a lobbyist who is a former special assistant to Thompson and former general counsel to president of the Illinois Senate, Lori Montana, a GOP fundraiser and former director of the state lottery, and Michael Mannion, a former insurance executive who was appointed director of the banking division of the Illinois Department of Financial and Professional Regulation this year by Gov. Bruce Rauner.
In the 2014 interview, Bourland said that legislators are frequent visitors to the mansion, especially during legislative sessions when receptions and parties are often held in the building.
“I think one of my jobs, other than all the other stuff that we do here, is to make friends,” Bourland said. “We have members who come over here maybe two or three times a week. I have a lot of friends over in the legislature.”
Contact Bruce Rushton at [email protected].